Lawmakers want to give Delaware State Police more money

Delaware State Police could end up with $1.4 million more than it requested, money that would be used to help purchase more bullet-proof vests and fund the transition to a full-time SORT team.

Delaware State Police

Delaware State Police

William Bretzger, The News Journal

Several lawmakers who sit on the General Assembly's budget-writing committee said they want to provide those extra funds to ensure state troopers and the public are afforded the best protection possible.

"We hear lots of budget requests that we need to consider," said Sen. Dave Lawson, R-Marydel, a retired state trooper. "But nothing is more important than saving police officers' lives."

The Delaware State Police's Special Operations Response Team are troopers called in to handle standoffs, such as someone barricaded inside their home or a hostage situation. They also typically serve warrants on high-risk individuals and certain surveillance operations.

The team currently is made up of troopers who work on other assignments until the SORT team is mobilized, which happens on average about 111 times a year.

Providing overtime to those troopers – the men and women who cover for them when they are on assignment – typically costs the state about $225,000 a year.

"Rather than pulling police officers from off-duty or another department, I think having people dedicated to that purpose are trained specifically for those times of incidents makes sense," said state Sen. Nicole Poore, D-New Castle. "We need to be forward thinking rather than reactive."

Lawson, who oversaw the SORT Team for eight years, agreed that the part-time nature of the unit was problematic.

"You're grabbing people from Sussex and New Castle and all over the state when a situation is occurring," he said. "That really cuts down on your response time."

Robert Coupe, secretary of the Delaware Department of Safety & Homeland Security, said recent estimates place the cost of moving to a full-time, 10-person SORT team at about $1.2 million for the first year and then less than $1 million in later years.

"Obviously, the division of state police has been meeting their needs with a part-time team," he said. "But if there's an opportunity to fund a full-time team, we think there are a lot of benefits to it."

Those benefits would include increased training as a team and preserving manpower in other units. The start-up costs would include filling the jobs currently held by SORT team members, he said.

Lawson and state Rep. William Carson, D-Smyrna, also championed allocating another $160,000 to the Delaware State Police for about 130 additional bulletproof vests.

Gov. John Carney's proposed spending plan for the coming fiscal year would allocate $70,000 for new body armor, which typically has a shelf life of about five years. That would only cover the purchase of about 58 new vests, well short of the 191 that are set to expire next year.

"I would strongly suggest... that we need to look really hard to continue funding for this each year so officers aren't out there with body armor that might in fact fail," Lawson said.

He and the other 11 members of the Legislature's Joint Finance Committee are in the process of hearing the spending requests from various state agencies. The committee will not begin the process of crafting the state's final spending plan until the end of May. It's proposal then must be approved by both the House and Senate.

If allocated later this year, the new funding proposed by Lawson and other legislators would bring the Delaware State Police budget to about $119.5 million, a bump of about 3.3 percent.

The state police fall under the Delaware Department of Homeland Security, which is requesting $137.5 million for the next fiscal year.